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Root Infinitive Analogues: Evidence from Tamil, Korean, and Japanese

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Perspectives on the Architecture and Acquisition of Syntax

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Abstract

Amritavalli and Jayaseelan (2005) propose that in Kannada and Malayalam, a clause structure does not project a Tense Phrase and what appears to be Tense in the affirmative verb is actually Aspect, and that finiteness is a property of Mood Phrase, which can be occupied by any one of the three elements: AGR (agreement), Neg (negation), or modal . In this chapter, we argue based on the research presented in Lakshmanan (2006), Kim and Phillips (1998) and Murasugi and Fuji (2008) that Tamil, Korean and Japanese-acquiring children around two years of age go through the stage of the Root Infinitive analogue in which they assume that their mother tongue is like Malayalam. The non-adult grammatical behavior of very young children is relevant for the long debate about the innate knowledge of grammar. If the ways where child and adult grammars can differ are restricted to ways in which adult grammars can differ from each other, then they would provide supportive evidence for the innateness of Universal Grammar.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Just like in English, very young children speaking Swahili also omit functional elements such as Tense and subject agreement (Deen 2002). An RI phenomenon has also been identified for children acquiring languages that do not have an infinitive construction. In Modern Greek, for example, a bare subjunctive/perfective is reported to be the Root Infinitive Analogue (RIA) (Varlokosta et al. 1996; Hyams 2002).

  2. 2.

    According to Lee (1993) cited by Kim and Phillips (1998), the ratio of -e and other Mood morphemes used in the informal discourse in adult Korean was 58:42.

  3. 3.

    T- or C-related elements do not co-occur with RIs in a lot of European languages (Rizzi 1993/1994; Wexler 1994).

  4. 4.

    While children produce erroneous nonfinite verbs in the matrix clause as in (ia) during the RI stage, they also produce adult-like finite verbs as in (ib) (Wexler 1994) in German.

  5. 5.

    Our results are consistent with Sano (1995) and Kato et al. (2003) with respect that the erroneous nonfinite verbs are not found with the two-year-old Japanese-speaking children.

  6. 6.

    The context for (15a) is the following: Sumihare’s father (Noji, the observer) went out for a walk with Sumihare on his back. Noji, Sumihare’s father, tried to get back home, but Sumihare pointed to a different direction and produced a bare adverbial “atti (there)” twice. Then, Sumihare, again, got frustrated and produced the V-ta form, “atti i-ta (there go-Past)” angrily.

  7. 7.

    It is also interesting to note that na in Japanese behaves like Kannada in the sense that Mood Phrase can be occupied by any one of the three elements AGR (agreement), Neg (negation), or modal (Amritavalli and Jayaseelan 2005). It also reminds us of the analysis of the adult Root Infinitives by Etxepare and Grohmann (2005), which states that the adult Root Infinitives consist of two overtly expressed parts: the root infinitive proper (RI), orthographically indicated by “?!” (evoking a question-like exclamation) such as “John go to the movies?!”, and the Coda (a further exclamation that seems to deny the truth value of the RI) such as “I would never do such a thing!” According to Etxepare and Grohmann (2005), the two properties are also found in Spanish as in “Yo ir a esa fiesta?! Jamás! (Me go to that party?! Never!)”.

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  1. Nanzan University, 18 Yamazato, Showa-ku, Nagoya, Japan

    Keiko Murasugi

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  1. Keiko Murasugi
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Correspondence to Keiko Murasugi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Telangana, India

    Gautam Sengupta

  2. Department of Linguistics and Contemporary English, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, Telangana, India

    Shruti Sircar

  3. Department of Materials Development, Testing and Evaluation, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, Telangana, India

    Madhavi Gayathri Raman

  4. Department of Computational Linguistics, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, Telangana, India

    Rahul Balusu

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Murasugi, K. (2017). Root Infinitive Analogues: Evidence from Tamil, Korean, and Japanese. In: Sengupta, G., Sircar, S., Raman, M., Balusu, R. (eds) Perspectives on the Architecture and Acquisition of Syntax. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4295-9_13

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